Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  The “faithful” husband (pistos) was not the one who linked the state of marriage to the renunciation of all sexual pleasure enjoyed with someone else; it was the husband who steadfastly maintained the privileges to which the wife was entitled by marriage. Moreover, this is how the “betrayed” women who appear in Euripides’ tragedies understand the matter. Medea complains bitterly of Jason’s “unfaithfulness”: he has forsaken her for a royal bride and he will beget descendants who will reduce his children by Medea to a state of humiliation and servitude. 31 What makes Creusa lament the imagined “betrayal” of Xuthus is the thought of living “a childless life, in a house forsaken and solitary”; it is that—at least this is what she is made to believe—“into her house,” which was the house of Erechtheus, will come “a motherless nobody, some slave’s brat.” 32 This preeminence of the wife, which the husband must protect, was implied by the act of marriage. But it was not acquired once and for all; it was not guaranteed by any moral pledge on the part of the husband; even in addition to the possibility of repudiation and divorce, there was always the threat of a de facto loss of prestige. Now, what Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and Ischomachus’ discourse show is that while the husband’s wisdom—his enkrateia but also his knowledge as head of a family—was always ready to acknowledge the wife’s privileges, the wife, if she was to preserve them, must in return exercise her function in the house and accomplish the tasks that were associated with it in the best possible way. Ischomachus does not promise his wife at the outset either “sexual fidelity” in the way we understand it, or even that she will never have to fear any other preference on his part; but just as he assures her that her activity as mistress of the house, her bearing and her way of dressing, will give her a greater charm than that of the servants, he also assures her that she can keep the place of honor in the house until old age.

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  The distinction between the Supreme God and the Creator, present also in the teaching of Marcion, under lay the Valentinian myths of the emanation of aeons and the Basilidian doctrine of creation out of nothing. Between the Supreme God and the created world, accord ing to Ptolemy, was a demiurge, "the Father and God of everything outside the pleroma." In support of this he adduced the testimony of the prologue to the Gospel of John, according to which "a certain principle was first generated by God ... in which the Father emitted all things seminally." Thus "to all the aeons after it the Logos was the cause of formation and origin." Another Valentinian exegete, Heracleon, also found support for his teaching in the Gospel of John, but he taught that "the aeon and what is in the aeon did not come into being through the Logos," since the aeon was distinct from the created world. Although the Gospel of Truth did not attribute the creation of the world to a demiurge or some other intermediate principle, this was the direc tion taken by the Valentinian and other Gnostic doctrines of creation, "the direction of hostility toward the Crea tor." The God of the Old Testament, who was equated with the demiurge, was eventually seen as less than the Supreme God and as an enemy. Yet the detailed theogonies of the Gnostic teachers were finally aimed at dealing with the human predica ment, not simply at accounting for the origin of the cosmos. As one Gnostic teacher counseled, "Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is who within you makes everything his own and says, 'My God, my mind, my Systems of Cosmic Redemption 87 thought, my soul, my body.' Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, rests without willing, becomes angry without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully Hipp.Haer.8.15.1-2 (GCS . . , -n r i 1 • • ir>> 26:235) investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself. Cosmology provided the context for a doctrine of creation and fall, and for an eventual doctrine of redemption. Each in its own way, the Gnostic systems all included a diagnosis of the cosmological descent of the human spirit into matter and sin. In the Gospel of Truth, error (represented in a quasi-personal form) conspired against Ev.Ver.1-1.^ (Grobei 46) truth, that is, God, and led men astray. Ptolemy's expla nation of the fall was characteristically more elaborate. The thirtieth and last of the aeons, wisdom, fell from the perfection of the pleroma through an excess of pas sion, finally giving birth to a shapeless mass. "And hence they declare material substance had its beginning from 1:16-17) [ ner ] ignorance and grief, and fear and bewilderment."

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Although she had never mentioned her writing abilities before, one day Regina came in clutching a stack of stories she had written long ago. I asked if she would pick one and read it aloud After a few deep breaths, and in a strong, clear voice, she told the “fiction” of a little girl under siege and the imaginary friends who had been her witnesses. My first urge was to distance myself from the overwhelming emotions—terror, rage, utter desperation—by commenting on the impressive writing, but I remained silent. I was simultaneously shocked, outraged at this brutal man, and in awe of Regina, whose creative impulse had helped her to preserve the truth and survive the intolerable. She was equally courageous about facing what she came to call “The Big Lie”—the belief that her stepfather’s behavior had something to do with her being special. But face it she did, and with her realization came a flood of tears that seemed at times as if they would never stop. She found it almost as difficult to acknowledge the anger she had felt toward her mother, the one whose love she had always counted on but who, for some reason, had been unwilling or unable to protect her. When Regina found the courage to bring it up, her mother confessed her guilt as the two held each other and sobbed. Yes, she had suspected something wasn’t right. Yes, she remembered Regina begging her not to go to work. But she just couldn’t deal with it. As she reclaimed her painful history, Regina began reexamining her eroticism with a piercing new clarity. As a result of her stepfather’s abusive actions, she had developed a core belief that she had value only as a sex object. That was the one role in which she had a ghost of a chance of receiving even a speck of affection and tenderness from him. Her CET expressed these self-deprecating beliefs at the same time that it provided her with an indirect mechanism for affirming and protecting herself. Each time she invited—no, compelled—men to use her for sex, she became the master of her fate. At the same time, her vagina! muscles formed an involuntary harrier that expressed the “no” she couldn’t speak. The twin themes—repetition and reversal—that were so prominent among the men and women you met in the last chapter are clearly visible once again, only more dramatically here. By continually reenacting her trauma with a new twist, Regina symbolically converted her exploitation into a source of erotic power. As the manipulator of men’s sexual urges she shielded herself from the intolerable truth that Daddy had treated her as he had because he didn’t give a damn about her feelings. “I’d rather be the slut who seduced my father,” she once proclaimed, shocking herself with the implications of her insight, “than the worthless piece of shit he used.”

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  The water in my eyes I’d tried to hold back flooded down my cheeks, and Anaïs discreetly turned back to watch the road. Attempting to stop my tears, I stared through the portholes in the back of the T-bird at the green yards of expensive homes gliding by. I thought about negative romanticism, wanting only what I could not have, wanting Neal, who wasn’t coming back. He’d taken our sexual bond with him, and I knew I would never find its equal. That uninhibited intimacy, shameless, unlimited, had felt like true love. Felt more important than anything on Earth. I had expected that my loss of Neal would be a nuclear holocaust, annihilating everything in its wake: the houses, all the people, the plants, the very air. But here I was curled up in the Thunderbird’s rump seat, still alive, frightened as a child jolted awake by a nightmare but with my loving family close at hand. I realized with sudden, blessed relief that sexual passion, fabulous as it was, had no monopoly on love. The world went on, and all those I loved, except for Neal, had been spared: my mother, Renate and Anaïs, my friends, my cat. We shared the close-at-hand kind of romanticism. Perhaps it was Anaïs’s ability to romanticize real life that made her so irresistible. She was the ethereal stuff of dreams, yet so close, so present, so connected. When she turned around in her seat again, it was to talk excitedly about editing her diary for publication. “I’ve decided it should begin with a description of the iron gates of Louveciennes and Henry walking up the path to the old house the first time I saw him. I’m going to leave Hugo out, as I did in the version I gave you, only entirely. There won’t even be a mention of my having a husband.” “So it will seem like you’re alone at Louveciennes?” I asked. “I’ll keep my mother and the housekeeper.” “Won’t people wonder how you could afford all that?” “I don’t think that’s what readers care about. Is that what you cared about when you read the pages I gave you?” “No, but I knew you were married to Hugo.” I caught my breath for saying it in front of Rupert but then recalled we were talking about her life in the 1930s when Rupert was just a boy. When I glanced his way, Rupert’s handsome profile was perfectly composed. I said to Anaïs, “If Hugo is not in the diary, people will think you were a single woman in Paris.” She thought for a moment. “Well, that’s how it should have been! I’m going to give my readers a perfect life. My rrreal life, only perfected.” Rupert responded to that, offering her an approving smile.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  “My husband would stay a little while with me and then leave me. I began to notice sounds that came from the next room, like the wrestling of bodies. I could hear the rustle of the mats, occasionally a stifled murmur. At first I did not realize what it was. I got up noiselessly and opened the door. I saw then that my husband was lying there with two or three of the servant girls, caressing them. In the semidarkness their bodies were completely entangled. When I came in he chased them away. I wept. “My husband said to me, ‘I have lived so long in China I am used to them. I married you because I fell in love with you, but I cannot enjoy you as I do the other women . . . and I can’t tell you why.’ “But I pleaded with him to tell me the truth, pleaded and begged him. After a moment he said, ‘They are so small sexually, and you are larger . . .’”

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  Lucy and I attended the Yale School of Medicine when Shep Nuland still lectured there, but I knew him only in my capacity as a reader. Nuland was a renowned surgeon-philosopher whose seminal book about mortality, How We Die, had come out when I was in high school but made it into my hands only in medical school. Few books I had read so directly and wholly addressed that fundamental fact of existence: all organisms, whether goldfish or grandchild, die. I pored over it in my room at night, and remember in particular his description of his grandmother’s illness, and how that one passage so perfectly illuminated the ways in which the personal, medical, and spiritual all intermingled. Nuland recalled how, as a child, he would play a game in which, using his finger, he indented his grandmother’s skin to see how long it took to resume its shape—a part of the aging process that, along with her newfound shortness of breath, showed her “gradual slide into congestive heart failure…the significant decline in the amount of oxygen that aged blood is capable of taking up from the aged tissues of the aged lung.” But “what was most evident,” he continued, “was the slow drawing away from life….By the time Bubbeh stopped praying, she had stopped virtually everything else as well.” With her fatal stroke, Nuland remembered Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: “With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but ’tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it.” I had spent so much time studying literature at Stanford and the history of medicine at Cambridge, in an attempt to better understand the particularities of death, only to come away feeling like they were still unknowable to me. Descriptions like Nuland’s convinced me that such things could be known only face-to-face. I was pursuing medicine to bear witness to the twinned mysteries of death, its experiential and biological manifestations: at once deeply personal and utterly impersonal. I remember Nuland, in the opening chapters of How We Die, writing about being a young medical student alone in the OR with a patient whose heart had stopped. In an act of desperation, he cut open the patient’s chest and tried to pump his heart manually, tried to literally squeeze the life back into him. The patient died, and Nuland was found by his supervisor, covered in blood and failure. Medical school had changed by the time I got there, to the point where such a scene was simply unthinkable: as medical students, we were barely allowed to touch patients, let alone open their chests. What had not changed, though, was the heroic spirit of responsibility amid blood and failure. This struck me as the true image of a doctor. — The first birth I witnessed was also the first death.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  59 The ambulance—a contract service of the County of Los Angeles—arrived at my father’s death about half an hour after the county fire engine. By then, the fire fighters had delivered my father from the bathroom and had laid him out on the living room carpet. I continued to sit on the edge of my bed in the middle room as they tried to restore the rhythm of my father’s heart. The fire fighters were dressed in the stiff canvas jackets that protect them from the flames they rarely have to put out. The men bent over my father awkwardly, adjusting the electrocardiograph and receiving radioed instructions from the hospital emergency room. My father’s heart was unruly. The beats only flickered through the monitor. The defibrillator the fire fighters used only gave his heart another spasm, a shudder he did not feel. When the fire fighters were done, I rode with the body in the ambulance, its siren shouting. My brother brought me back from the hospital. I spent that night in the empty house, as I continue to spend each night at home. 60 He could not choose to deny his father, even less his father’s beliefs. These have become as material to him as the stucco-over-chicken-wire from which these houses are made. It is not a question of denying the city in which he lives, though he doubts his father cared much for living in it. He doubts if his father cared for much of anything you would find familiar at all. “I am still here,” he often tells himself. This is how he has resurrected his father’s obligations, which he sometimes mistakes for his father’s faith. “I will never go away,” he once told the girl he loved, because it suited her desperation and his notion of the absurd. Loving Christ badly was finally the best he could do. 61 There are ugly deaths. And then, there are the dead. You and I, who grew up in the years after the Second World War, saw enough reasons for dying. We saw the movie versions of storm troopers, kamikaze pilots, quislings, and the cowards who would not face them. Our parents’ war lapped over us in gray shadows from television sets in darkened living rooms. That lunar blue-gray was the emotional color of violence and the dead it produced. When images of real war appeared, in programs like Victory at Sea , the ashen dead were never less than themselves. When I was called to the hospital table on which my father was laid, after his dying had moved throughout his body, he was the color of television’s black-and-white dead. 62 My father died of tachycardia. My mother had died of congestive heart failure. It seems that my father’s heart finally raced ahead of him, while my mother’s had lagged behind. 63 After forty years of development, there are 26,766 places to live in this suburb. On any day, about 2 percent are vacant.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  A white-clad intern, stethoscope around his neck, went with them, but he didn’t stay long—just long enough to know he wasn’t needed. When they started separating the debris, a few bodies, or parts of them, became distinguishable. The bodies were brought out in bags and folded blankets. Workers formed a chain to hand up the remains. A woman who had somehow evaded police lines and tumbled through the snow too close to the carnage was sick and had to be helped away. As darkness gathered, floodlights were set up on either bank of the river. The cutting torches went deeper into the tail. More bodies were brought out. The plane just missed taking down the water company offices, where fifty employees worked during the week. Hamilton Junior High was only a block away. These details would make it into his story. MiriNone of them was hungry that night but Irene insisted they eat something. She whipped up scrambled eggs and toast while Henry’s girlfriend, Leah, told them how close the plane had come to the Elks Club. “Henry had just left when we saw it. I ran out after him but he was already gone. So I went back inside and started playing the piano really loud. I played a march and told the children to pretend they were elephants. One of the volunteers pulled the velvet drapes closed so the children couldn’t see anything. We didn’t want to frighten them, so we just kept singing and playing games until their parents came to take them home. We heard the explosions but we pretended to be lions in the jungle, roaring. No one told the children to use their indoor voices. No one told them to settle down. For once they did whatever they wanted, making as much noise as they wanted. And all of them in their party clothes. All those patent-leather Mary Janes. Really, I didn’t know what I was doing. My friend, she went crazy. She saw it out the window and just slumped to the floor. One of the mothers had to take her to the ladies’ lounge to lie down. What could I do? I was responsible for all those children. One hundred children. It could have crashed into—” Rusty covered Leah’s hand with her own, like a big sister. “But it didn’t and the children are fine, thanks to you and your quick thinking.” Until then Miri hadn’t thought about how close the plane had come to her school. Suppose it had been a weekday instead of a Sunday? Suppose the plane hadn’t made it to the frozen riverbed? Henry came home just long enough to drop a kiss on Leah’s cheek, scarf down some food and change into dry clothes. He must have gotten wet at the crash site. Miri could tell by the way he was walking that his leg hurt. He had a cane but Miri had never seen him use it. “I have to get back,” Henry said.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  It’s a devastating loss.” He paused and turned away, using a handkerchief to dab at his eyes. When he regained his composure he said, voice breaking, “There was nothing left of Ruby but that Bulova watch and the infant in her arms.” The infant belonged to Ruby’s seatmate. At 7 months, he was the youngest member of a family—his mother, his grandmother and his 2-year-old brother—all of whom died when the C-46 crashed and exploded. Ruby’s last stop before leaving New York for the airport was Hanson’s Drug Store. Jimmy Bower, who worked behind the counter and had once danced with Ruby in a show, was distraught. “She loved all things strawberry,” he said. “I made her a strawberry ice cream soda. I kidded her about eating the Maraschino cherry on top. She enjoyed it down to the last lick. Sunday was the saddest day of my life. A lot of the dancers who hang out here feel the same way. Ruby lit up the room, always ready to enjoy a joke, always with that dynamite smile.” The owner of the Vagabond in Miami, where Ruby was heading, said there was no replacing Ruby. “Oh, sure, there are plenty of dancers out there, but Ruby had that certain something. That je ne sais quoi, if you’ll pardon my French,” Frank Viti said. “She made the audience feel special, as if every dance move was just for them. Not that many dancers connect on a personal level, but Ruby Granik gave it her all.” Her mother said she was an ambitious girl. “Since she was a child she knew what she wanted and she figured out how to get it. She didn’t depend on anyone to hand it to her. Not Ruby. We named her for Ruby Keeler, my favorite movie star. Who knew our Ruby would also be a dancer, a star? When our family hit rough times and I had to give up my job to care for my husband, Ruby became our sole support. But our girl never complained. She was a gem, just like her name.” Her boyfriend, brother of actor and entertainer Danny Thomas, declined this reporter’s request for an interview. He was in seclusion, according to family members, mourning the loss of a wonderful girl. 5 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] [image file=Image00005.jpg] ChristinaChristina Demetrious was done in by that news story. Ruby was an ambitious girl…she knew what she wanted, Ruby’s mother said. She couldn’t get that line out of her head. If she died suddenly, would her mother say that about her? She didn’t think so. Her mother didn’t know who she was or what she wanted. And that thought made her cry as much as the story in the paper. Christina and her family had been at an anniversary party for her aunt and uncle in Metuchen on the day the plane crashed. The next morning, when Papou, her grandfather, had taken out the trash, he’d found pieces of the plane in their yard.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  Holmer, the old lawyer, had updated his will a few years before he died, bequeathing any earthly possessions he hadn’t already liquidated to his wife. That included my moth er’s family treasures—some old mahogany furniture, the few silver-plated pieces they hadn’t already sold, and some bone china. We’d been afraid that something like this might happen. A month or so after Holmer died, our aunt Dodie, the widow of my mother’s brother, Tom, took his wife to an expensive restaurant, hoping that, if she buttered her up enough, the wife would see it in her heart to give us some of the Gutenkunst family belongings. They’re really only interested in some things of their mother’s, my aunt said. The wife told Aunt Dodie that she was too distraught about Holmer’s death to concentrate on details like that. She’d need time to think about it. If I decide to give them anything, I’ll let Mary Kay know. But she never did. Now Mary Kay was getting the boot as she tried to retrieve anything that we considered a family heirloom. So I dispatched my old St. Francis pal Terry to buy up all she could of whatever was left of our childhood chattel. Patty did the same with a few of her friends. They sent texts of themselves in funny hats sipping imaginary tea from the newly ransomed china. For a couple hundred bucks, we came away with my great-grandparents’ nightstand, some mismatched water goblets, and a few place settings of Wedgwood dishes. These sentimental treasures may not have been worth much on the open market, but they represented pieces of our past, and it was painful to see them sold to strangers without our consent. As with Holmer’s ashes and the family pictures that had been schlepped to the rummage sale years earlier, the crude disposal of my mother’s family belongings felt like another kick in the gut, like the things we valued were little more than garbage. This is from your grandmother, I told my daughter, Molly, misty-eyed, at her wedding shower a few months later as I handed her a box with one of my mother’s Wedgwood teacups and saucers. Molly was just four years old when my mother died, but I knew she would treasure this tangible link to her grandmother. All she remembered of my mother came from snapshots and a grainy home movie of her putting nail polish on Molly’s little fingers. Molly smiled as she examined the delicate white and blue ivy pattern. When she turned the cup over, I saw her face fall. Oops, I said. Give me that thing. I grabbed the cup quickly and peeled off the neon tag that advertised a sale price of two dollars. After losing Nancy and Danny, my mother, and Holmer, it felt a little petty to be stewing over salad plates and some silver tongs. Get off the pity pot! I could practically hear Holmer shouting from his multiple graves. He would be right.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  The real treasures, of course, could not be sold at a discount. The six of us Kissingers still had each other. WITH MY EDITORS’ DEFT oversight, I finished my yearlong examination of the county’s troubled mental health system. The series had been an unqualified success, prompting reforms of state law. It was declared a winner by the judges of the George Polk Award as a “revelatory, analytical and conclusive study of a system that barely functions.” But now I was the one barely functioning. My nerves felt shot. I’d run out of energy. I was starting to get flashbacks: My mother’s wrist, bandaged where she tried to open her veins with a pair of scissors. Nancy’s casket swinging on the crane. The handwritten note that Danny stuffed into his pocket just before wrapping the electrical cord around his neck, urging him to “collect treasures for Heaven.” I wanted a break from waking up each morning and thinking about these things and about how to quantify the harm to people whose brains betrayed them. But I didn’t have the courage to say so. Was it my ego? Guilt? A savior complex? Or was I, just like any reporter on a hot beat, a dog with a bone? Out of the blue came an opportunity for a fresh start. I’d been offered positions as a visiting professor, first at my alma mater in Indiana, then at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, teaching investigative reporting. Susanne, my old newsroom reporting partner, was supervising a team of Columbia science journalism fellows and recommended me to the dean. I jumped at the chance. Here was a new way for me to attack the same old beast—training bright young reporters with a lot more energy and data skills than I had to expose the cracks in the so-called mental health system. Many of them had struggled with their own mental health or had close relatives who did. They shared my enthusiasm for shining a light on this scandal. Some were eager to share the details of their battles with depression, eating disorders, and anxiety. As grateful and impressed as I was with their candor, I didn’t want my class to be regarded as a kind of group therapy session. My job was to train them to conduct skillful investigations of why people aren’t getting the care they need, to identify specifically who is responsible, and, if possible, to suggest solutions. Investigative reporting is tough enough, I told them. But writing about people with mental illness is especially challenging. “No one cares about crazy people,” that awful Wisconsin political operative had said in reaction to our stories about the dangerous conditions inside the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex. Unfortunately, she’s not the only one who believes that. If we were writing about celebrities or abused animals, you’d have no trouble getting internet traffic, I told my students.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Then suddenly, she sprouted curly hair the color of a new penny and started speaking nonstop. But it sounded like gibberish, and everyone thought she was addled except for Mom, who understood her perfectly and said she had an excellent vocabulary. A year after Lori was born, Mom and Dad had a second daughter, Mary Charlene, who had coal-black hair and chocolate-brown eyes, just like Dad. But Mary Charlene died one night when she was nine months old. Crib death, Mom always said. Two years later, I was born. “You were to replace Mary Charlene,” Mom said. She told me that she had ordered up a second redheaded girl so Lori wouldn’t feel like she was weird. “You were such a skinny baby,” Mom used to tell me. “The longest, boniest thing the nurses had ever seen.” Brian arrived when I was one. He was a blue baby, Mom said. When he was born, he couldn’t breathe and came into this world having a seizure. Whenever Mom told the story, she would hold her arms rigid and clench her teeth and go bug-eyed to show how Brian looked. Mom said when she saw him like that, she thought, Uh-oh, looks like this one’s a goner, too. But Brian lived. For the first year of his life, he kept having those seizures, then one day they just stopped. He turned into a tough little guy who never whined or cried, even the time I accidentally pushed him off the top bunk and he broke his nose. Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you’re young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encourages them, she told us. That’s positive reinforcement for negative behavior. Mom never seemed upset about Mary Charlene’s death. “God knows what He’s doing,” she said. “He gave me some perfect children, but He also gave me one that wasn’t so perfect, so He said, ‘Oops, I better take this one back.’” Dad, however, wouldn’t talk about Mary Charlene. If her name came up, his face grew stony and he’d leave the room. He was the one who found her body in the crib, and Mom couldn’t believe how much it shook him up. “When he found her, he stood there like he was in shock or something, cradling her stiff little body in his arms, and then he screamed like a wounded animal,” she told us. “I never heard such a horrible sound.” Mom said Dad was never the same after Mary Charlene died. He started having dark moods, staying out late and coming home drunk, and losing jobs. One day soon after Brian was born, we were short on cash, so Dad pawned Mom’s big diamond wedding ring, which her mother had paid for, and that upset Mom.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  “Scissors!” Melissa cut out my amateur knots, resutured the wound, applied the dressing, and the patient was taken to recovery. As Melissa had told me earlier, twenty-four weeks in utero was considered the edge of viability. The twins had lasted twenty-three weeks and six days. Their organs were present, but perhaps not yet ready for the responsibility of sustaining life. They were owed nearly four more months of protected development in the womb, where oxygenated blood and nutrients came to them through the umbilical cord. Now oxygen would have to come through the lungs, and the lungs were not capable of the complex expansion and gas transfer that was respiration. I went to see them in the NICU, each twin encased in a clear plastic incubator, dwarfed by large, beeping machines, barely visible amid the tangle of wires and tubes. The incubator had small side ports through which the parents could strain to reach and gently stroke a leg or arm, providing vital human contact. The sun was up, my shift over. I was sent home, the image of the twins being extracted from the uterus interrupting my sleep. Like a premature lung, I felt unready for the responsibility of sustaining life. When I returned to work that night, I was assigned to a new mother. No one anticipated problems with this pregnancy. Things were as routine as possible; today was even her actual due date. Along with the nurse, I followed the mother’s steady progress, contractions racking her body with increasing regularity. The nurse reported the dilation of the cervix, from three centimeters to five to ten. “Okay, it’s time to push now,” the nurse said. Turning to me, she said, “Don’t worry—we’ll page you when the delivery is close.” I found Melissa in the doctors’ lounge. After some time, the OB team was called into the room: delivery was near. Outside the door, Melissa handed me a gown, gloves, and a pair of long boot covers. “It gets messy,” she said. We entered the room. I stood awkwardly off to the side until Melissa pushed me to the front, between the patient’s legs, just in front of the attending. “Push!” the nurse encouraged. “Now again: just like that, only without the screaming.”

• From White Oleander (1999)

  She was so thin, she was starving herself. I’d caught her vomiting after we ate. “I was pregnant once, at Yale. It never occurred to me that was the only baby I’d ever have.” The whine of the lawn mower filled the silence. I would have liked to say something encouraging, but I couldn’t think of anything. I plucked the heart off her back. Her thinness belied her spoken desire. She’d lost so much weight she could wear my clothes now. She did when I was at school. I came home sometimes and certain outfits were warm, smelling of L’Air du Temps. I pictured her in my clothes, certain things she favored, a plaid skirt, a skinny top. Standing in the mirror, imagining she was sixteen, a junior in high school. She did a perfect imitation of me, the gawky teenager. Crossing her legs the way I did, twining them and tucking the foot behind the calf. Starting with a shrug before I talked, dismissing what I was about to say in advance. My uneasy smile, that flashed and disappeared in a second. She tried me on like my clothes. But it wasn’t me she wanted to be, it was just sixteen. I watched the garden under the blinds, the long shadows cast by the cypress, the palm, across the textured green. If she were sixteen, what? She wouldn’t have made the mistakes she’s made? Maybe she would choose better? Maybe she wouldn’t have to choose at all, she could just stay sixteen. But she was trying on the wrong person’s clothes. I wasn’t anyone she’d want to be. She was too fragile to be me, it would crush her, like the pressure of a deep wall dive. Mostly she lay here like this, thinking about Ron, when would he come home, was there another woman? Worrying about luck and evil influences, while wearing talismans of her family past, women who did something with their lives, made something of themselves, or at least got dressed every day, women who never kissed a sixteen-year-old foster daughter because they felt unreal, never let the weeds grow in their gardens because it was too hot to pull them. I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It frightened me for Claire to bare her needs so openly. If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away. I didn’t need to put mirrors on the roof to know that. IT WAS A RELIEF when Ron came home. She got up, took a shower, cleaned the house. She made food, too much of it, and put on red lipstick. She took off Leonard Cohen and put on Teddy Wilson’s big band, sang along to “Basin Street Blues.” Ron made love with her at night, sometimes even in the afternoon.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  94THE BLACK PLAGUE - IThe Indians were not removed from the location as soon as the Municipality secured its ownership. It was necessary to find the residents suitable new quarters before dislodging them, but as the Municipality could not easily do this, the Indians were suffered to stay in the same ‘dirty’ location, with this difference that their condition became worse than before. Having ceased to be proprietors they became tenants of the Municipality, with the result that their surroundings became more insanitary than ever. When they were proprietors, they had to maintain some sort of cleanliness, if only for fear of the law. The Municipality had no such fear! The number of tenants increased, and with them the squalor and the disorder. While the Indians were fretting over this state of things, there was a sudden outbreak of the black plague, also called the pneumonic plague, more terrible and fatal than the bubonic. Fortunately it was not the location but one of the gold mines in the vicinity of Johannesburg that was responsible for the outbreak. The workers in this mine were for the most part negroes, for whose cleanliness their white employers were solely responsible. There were a few Indians also working in connection with the mine, twenty-three of whom suddenly caught the infection, and returned one evening to their quarters in the location with an acute attack of the plague. Sjt. Madanjit, who was then canvassing subscribers for Indian Opinion and realizing subscriptions, happened to be in the location at this moment. He was a remarkably fearless man. His heart wept to see these victims of the scourage, and he sent a pencil-note to me to the following effect: ‘There has been a sudden outbreak of the black plague. You must come immediately and take prompt measures, otherwise we must be prepared for dire consequences. Please come immediately.’ Sjt. Madanjit bravely broke open the lock of a vacant house, and put all the patients there. I cycled to the location, and wrote to the Town Clerk to inform him of the circumstances in which we had taken possession of the house. Dr. William Godfrey, who was practising in Johannesburg, ran to the rescue as soon as he got the news, and became both nurse and doctor to the patients. But twenty-three patients were more than three of us could cope with.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  A match flickers but does not light. The mother’s wailing in room 543, the searing red rims of the father’s lower eyelids, tears silently streaking his face: this flip side of joy, the unbearable, unjust, unexpected presence of death…What possible sense could be made, what words were there for comfort? “Was it the right choice, to do an emergency C-section?” I asked. “No question,” she said. “It was the only shot they had.” “What happens if you don’t?” “Probably, they die. Abnormal fetal heart tracings show when the fetal blood is turning acidemic; the cord is compromised somehow, or something else seriously bad is happening.” “But how do you know when the tracing looks bad enough? Which is worse, being born too early or waiting too long to deliver?” “Judgment call.” What a call to make. In my life, had I ever made a decision harder than choosing between a French dip and a Reuben? How could I ever learn to make, and live with, such judgment calls? I still had a lot of practical medicine to learn, but would knowledge alone be enough, with life and death hanging in the balance? Surely intelligence wasn’t enough; moral clarity was needed as well. Somehow, I had to believe, I would gain not only knowledge but wisdom, too. After all, when I had walked into the hospital just one day before, birth and death had been merely abstract concepts. Now I had seen them both up close. Maybe Beckett’s Pozzo is right. Maybe life is merely an “instant,” too brief to consider. But my focus would have to be on my imminent role, intimately involved with the when and how of death—the grave digger with the forceps.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Some thought they heard an astronaut saying “We’re burning up!” After that, there was nothing but silence. Flames spread through the capsule. None of the astronauts could overcome the cabin’s highly pressurized atmosphere and move the inward-opening hatch. Seconds later, the capsule ruptured. Technicians rushed to the scene but were beaten back by heat and fire; almost six minutes passed before they could get inside. Rescue personnel found the crew, already expired from asphyxiation, their space suits fused to the melted interior of the spacecraft. Seven hours passed before the bodies could be removed. Until now, the American space program had owned an excellent safety record; even a chimpanzee named Ham, who’d flown on a suborbital mission in 1961, had come through it safely. Suddenly, three American heroes had died without ever leaving the launchpad, and in a way that seemed entirely preventable. Hundreds of grown men at NASA were reduced to tears by the accident. Media reports blamed an electrical spark for igniting the pure oxygen environment of the spacecraft’s cabin. But to many, there seemed a more basic explanation. “There’s reason to believe that establishing a deadline of 1970 for the Moon flight contributed to their deaths,” said NBC News anchor Frank McGee. Like many, he thought that by rushing, NASA was risking safety. After surviving the congressional investigation into the fire, and enduring months of delay while instituting new safety measures, NASA was ready to resume flight operations. On November 9, 1967, controllers counted down the final seconds to the launch of Apollo 4 (Apollo 2 and 3 had been canceled in a reorganization after the fire). This would be the first test of the massive Saturn V booster, a rocket that was orders of magnitude more powerful than any NASA had ever launched, and the only one capable of taking a man to the Moon. The agency dared not put a man on board. At 7 A .M ., the rocket’s five enormous engines ignited, sending shock waves of sound and light and energy in every direction as 7.5 million pounds of thrust lifted the six-million-pound behemoth up and away from the launchpad. Three miles away, plaster dust fell from the ceiling in the Launch Control Center, while windows shook at the Howard Johnson’s Motel twelve miles from the launch site. Describing the event for a live television audience, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite grabbed the plate glass window of his booth to keep it from collapsing. “Our building is shaking here!” Cronkite said with uncharacteristic exuberance. “Oh, it’s terrific! The building’s shaking! This big blast window is shaking and we’re holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go into the clouds at three thousand feet! The roar is terrific! Look at it going!” The flight worked, every part of it, almost perfectly. It was clear now that America stood a fighting chance, not just of putting a man on the Moon, but of doing it by a long-dead president’s impossible deadline.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  As for intimate relationships, dads can offer guidance on personal integrity; establishing and respecting sexual boundaries; mutuality; caring; pleasure. They may want to share their own evolution on some of these topics, including past mistakes and regrets. Let me reiterate: no need to be perfect, to have all the answers, or even to feel totally comfortable discussing the questions. As one college sophomore told me, “In high school, it would have made all the difference in the world to have my dad talk to me about this, even though my mom did a really good job. Because subconsciously, as a teen guy, she was still a woman telling me these things, and I really, really needed my dad to be like, ‘Noah, this is real.’ And because he didn’t have those kinds of conversations with me, it instilled a pattern of me not having them with my friends or my partners. And I want to be having these conversations.” Mothers are more likely to talk with their sons about intimacy, but not as deeply or as broadly as they do with their daughters. Moms can also offer a more nuanced vision of female sexuality and explain why girls might act against their own best interests (by, say, hooking up with a guy known to be a jerk, or feeling obliged to satisfy a boy). Again, without going into excessive detail, you might consider sharing some of your own past experience, including with trauma. Women who have been sexually assaulted often feel compelled to tell their girls, even as they wrestle with when or how. But among the boys I met, hearing from a mother that she had been harmed had a life-altering impact. Obviously, that personal connection shouldn’t be necessary to inspire compassion, but for teenagers, who are still relatively concrete thinkers, knowing someone in your innermost circle was affected makes an issue real (it is also a chance for moms to model resilience). A college freshman, one of just three guys in his school’s anti-assault advocacy group, recalled, “When I was seventeen, my mom told me about times in college when she was drunk and men took advantage of her. I was so shocked. It was like, ‘This is happening to people I care about, people I love.’ That was when I realized how common it was. I will never forget that.”

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  "It was heartbreaking to lose my attraction for my husband. I couldn't talk about it. I didn't want to hurt him. And in a superstitious way, I felt like if I admitted out loud that it wasn't there anymore, it would never come back. I just prayed that it would. … We did have sex maybe once a week, but it didn't reach me. My body would respond, but the pleasure was like the pleasure of returning library books. … The thing about being repulsed by him was, I felt like my body was a room that I didn't want to mess up. Unlike that openness in the beginning when my body was a room and I didn't mind if he came in with his shoes on — when I wanted him to come in that way."

• From Cultish (2021)

  “So it would be a conscious transition,” Frank, now sixty-five, explained to me in an interview. “That didn’t really start to change until after Ti passed on.” The way Frank remembers it, Ti’s death had a traumatic effect on Do; he started to become more controlling, and his ideas about how to graduate to the next level morphed. That’s when ending their human lives crept into the picture.